The Provincial Court of Madrid has asked Judge Juan Carlos Peinado for the “complete testimony” of the trial opened against Begoña Gómez, wife of the President of the Government, before deciding whether to submit it as requested by the prosecution and the defense of the person under investigation. This is stated in a decree of September 9, to which elDiario.es has had access. The date of deliberation and decision on the aforementioned appeals is set for September 30. The sources of the accusations consulted by this newspaper affirm that this is an unusual move and that it may anticipate the abandonment of the investigation.
Gómez decided on July 8 to appeal to the Provincial Court of Madrid, a court superior to Judge Peinado, to request the opening of what she calls “a universal investigation” against her. In the appeal, Gómez’s lawyer denounced that the magistrate had undertaken a case on “the life and work” of the wife of the head of the Executive in what amounts to an investigation of a “prospective” nature expressly prohibited by law.
The day before, on July 7, the prosecution had also appealed to the Provincial Court to put some order into the “procedural drift” of Judge Peinado. The prosecution considered that the magistrate ignores the limits that the Provincial Court itself has imposed on him in the investigation, that he gives a “very broad” dimension to the case without clarifying his true motivations and that he continually acts in “generalities”, with a “lack of specificity” that prevents the person under investigation from exercising “a dignified defense.” The Economic Crime Section even spoke in its appeal of a “general cause” against Gómez.
In the last four months, none of the proceedings initiated by the judge have produced clear evidence of a crime against the people investigated: Gómez, businessman Carlos Barrabés and the rector of the Complutense University, Joaquín Goyache. Nor has the magistrate specified what he accuses them of. In addition, the investigations have already accumulated two exculpatory reports from the Civil Guard and half a dozen testimonies that deny irregularities in the events initially reported by the ultra-union Clean Hands.
The judge’s investigation focuses on several fronts, without excluding any behavior of Begoña Gómez since her husband is president of the government. One of them concerns the million-dollar public contracts obtained by businessman Carlos Barrabés, whose address was registered a few weeks ago by the Civil Guard. Another is the relationship that Gómez established at the Instituto de Empresa (IE) with the owners of Globalia, owner of the Air Europa company, and which was later saved by the government during the pandemic. And a third ramification is the relationship between the wife of the president of the government and the Complutense University of Madrid.
